The use of mobile devices and especially smart phones has significantly increased. Such mobile devices have become in many cases a primary replacement for other computing devices, allowing access by the mobile devices to data in a variety of application programs. Application programs, also known as applications or Apps, are designed to help a user of a mobile device (typically a smart phone or tablet computer) to perform specific tasks. Applications may be installed on a computing device, or may be accessible and sometimes downloadable from a web source such as, for example the AppStore®.
In order to navigate through the applications in mobile devices, a graphical user interface (GUI) is commonly used. A GUI is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices using images rather than text commands. However, because so many applications are now available, it has become significantly more difficult to navigate through applications that are either installed on the mobile device or accessible through the web, due to the display area of the mobile device which is quite limited by nature.
To easily navigate between applications in the mobile device, the user is provided with an option to arrange the applications in folders. A creation of a folder and placing applications in a folder is performed manually by applying different gestures. For example, a user of a mobile device can tap on an icon of one application and then drag the icon onto another icon representing a different application, in order to create a folder. Thereafter, any application can be tapped and dragged to the created folder. This allows reducing the clutter on the mobile device's display. The created folder can be automatically named by the operating system of the device or manually named by the user. For example, a user can place all icons of gaming applications in one folder and name the folder “games”.
However, currently available operating systems for mobile devices, such as iOS® or Android®, do not offer any solutions that either dynamically place applications in a folder or search for applications that can be included in a previously created folder. Furthermore, there is no current solution that provides any application to support such features.
It would be therefore advantageous to provide a solution that overcomes the limitations of the prior art by dynamically arranging the applications according the user's preferences.